Parnell gives Shaw a confused stare. ‘So you didn’t steal the wallet, but you still checked that you couldn’t be prosecuted for drinking “stolen” champagne eight years later?’
That bilious smile again. ‘Oh, that was just the start. Nicking wallets was just a giggle. Holly wanted bigger pay-offs to justify the risk.’ He clears his throat. ‘Do you know what a “badger game” is?’
Parnell looks blank. I do my best to summarise.
‘A woman gets a man – usually a married man – into a compromising position, and then a male accomplice bursts in and threatens the man with violence, scandal, the police, whatever, unless they cough up.’
‘It’s a con-trick,’ says Shaw. ‘It was small fry at first. Exactly as she said.’ He gestures to me. ‘Holly would hang around a bar, spot a guy wearing a wedding ring and then work her magic. It didn’t work every time, but you’d be surprised how often it did. Holly would bring them back to her place – we weren’t living together then – and after about ten minutes of relaxing them, getting them at least semi-naked, I’d burst in screaming that that was my girlfriend they were in bed with. I’d take a photo and if their phone was in sight, I’d grab it and threaten to send the image to all their contacts. If it wasn’t, it wasn’t a problem. Holly would usually have got enough info – where they worked, that sort of thing – so we always had something to threaten them with. To be honest, you didn’t need much. Just the shock was enough to make them agree to be frog-marched to the nearest cashpoint.’
And Loz and her dad still decided this louse was worth saving? He either talks a good game or they’re a family of Buddhist monks.
‘What’s the maximum you can get from a cashpoint?’ I ask. ‘Three hundred pounds? Maybe £500 if you’re a good customer. That only equates to a handful of wallets, I reckon. Surely that was easier than pulling this type of stunt?’
‘Exactly what Holly thought after a while, so she changed the rules, upped the game. She started going to the best bars – mainly Mayfair, Chelsea, the City – and she’d spend more time choosing the target. Looking at details. The watch they were wearing, their shoes. Moving on if she thought they weren’t rich enough.’ The baby tosses another bear out of the playpen. Shaw sighs and lifts her out, jigging her on his lap as he carries on. ‘The idea was that these targets would pay more, so we’d get whatever we could that night, but we’d insist they meet us the next night too to hand over the same again, on the understanding that we’d then delete the photo. And we did do that, initially. We played fair if they did.’
Parnell coughs – code for ‘can you actually believe this lowlife?’
‘Why not ask for more?’ I say. ‘If they were meeting you the next day, they could have gone to the bank, withdrawn any amount of cash, within reason.’
‘I was conscious about not being greedy – £500 to £1,000 wasn’t a huge amount to most of these men. We were confident they’d pay this to make us go away quietly. If we demanded more, it could get complicated. That was my view anyway.’
‘Not Holly’s?’
‘She felt that to truly protect ourselves, we had to make the threat more severe. See, there’d been this one target who’d called our bluff, said, “Fine, send it to my wife, she’s shagging around anyway.” Holly was fuming. There was no way she was risking that happening again. So she came up with the idea of . . .’ He pulls up for a moment, blinking slowly at the floor. ‘She came up with the idea of using roofies – Rohypnol – to really disable the target . . .’
‘ “Disable the target”? You’re talking about human beings here.’ Parnell’s voice is entirely calm but full of loathing.
‘Sorry, she wanted the men to be completely out of it, pretty much comatose, so we could get better photos. See, the photos we’d been taking up until that point were going to get you in trouble at home, for sure, and it’d be embarrassing if your work colleagues got hold of them, but they weren’t degrading, as such. Just Holly and the tar— the man, half-naked. Soft porn, at most. But if Holly could get them home, slip something in their drink – roofies work pretty quick – then . . .’ he’s struggling again, reluctant to revisit this old version of himself, ‘. . . we, she mainly, could stage far more compromising pictures. She could tie them up, dress them up, plant drugs beside them – and God, worse stuff too. I mean, use your imagination.’ I glance at Parnell, who looks like he’s just about given up on human nature. ‘And, of course, drugging them gave us time to go through their stuff, get phone numbers, find out where they worked, where their wives worked. Smartphones weren’t all that common back then, but people – these types of men, anyway – still had their lives programmed into their phones, their BlackBerry.’ He shrugs. ‘It was all working perfectly fine, there was no way anyone would call our bluff again, but then Holly got greedy – although she called it ambitious.’
The baby squirms on Shaw’s lap, getting restless. He puts her down on the floor, where she makes a beeline for Parnell’s shoes. I’d make a beeline for Parnell too, if it was a choice between him and this scuzzball.
‘I should have seen it coming, really. She was never going to be happy earning good money here and there. She wanted big money on a regular basis.’
‘Earning?’ Parnell’s even finding it hard to smile at the baby. ‘You mean stealing.’
Shaw throws his hands up. ‘Look, I clearly don’t have many good things to say about Holly, but she’d had a tough life. She was tossed around the care system after her parents died. Her aunt didn’t want her. Nobody ever really helped her so she helped herself. That’s how she saw it.’
‘And I can buy that,’ I say. ‘So what was your excuse?’
He takes it to be a genuine question, not the barb intended. ‘I honestly think I was having some sort of breakdown when I was with Holly. A delayed reaction to my mum dying. It’s not like I even needed the money. I had my own flat. I’d been a good estate agent, despite everything. I’d paid off a decent chunk of the mortgage. And I had a job with a friend’s agency that was going OK.’
‘So you blackmailed for fun.’
‘For the thrill. It helped numb the grief. But then Holly went too far.’
Losing my mum made me do it.
It’s not a bad line for the in-laws, but it’s unadulterated bollocks. People process grief in many different ways – me through the haze of white wine, Jacqui through the treadmill, Dad through the comfort of a thousand different beds. My brother, Noel – well, who gives a fuck about Noel, to be honest? I haven’t spoken to him in eighteen months and even that feels too recent. My point being that however you’re hurting yourself, however you’re getting through the night, grief doesn’t strip you of your sense of right and wrong. If anything, it heightens it.
‘You’re going to have to define “too far” for me, please,’ says Parnell. ‘Personally, I’d define stealing someone’s wallet as “too far”.’